Author: Cristian N.

The Case for Free Money – I have shared articles on this subject before, and the more I read, the more sense it makes. However I don’t think we are there yet as a civilization. Read it and let me know what you think.

Celery: why ? – I have often asked myself this very same question. But I also have never really cared all that much to find more information about it, until this article came my way 🙂

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Parasite Underground -A shadow network of patients are trying to treat their own debilitating diseases — by infecting themselves with gastrointestinal worms. I don’t even know what to say about this. Then again:

If you are stricken with a terrible disease for which medicine has little to offer, then what, really, do you have to lose by turning to a parasite?

There are many moments throughout my average day that, lacking print reading material in a previous era, were once occupied by thinking or observing my surroundings: walking or waiting somewhere, riding the subway, lying in bed unable to sleep or before mustering the energy to get up.

Now, though, I often find myself in these situations picking up my phone to check a notification, browse and read the internet, text, use an app or listen to audio (or, on rare occasions, engage in an old-fashioned “telephone call”). The last remaining place I’m guaranteed to be alone with my thoughts is in the shower.

Whether we want to admit it or not, most people no longer just reflect on anything whenever they find themselves with some free time on their hands. As the author says, most would rather pull out the phone and make themselves busy. We have less patience. I, for instance, find myself even skipping through movies or tv-shows when the action dies down or when the characters start long, boring monologues. Technology has changed us ( or maybe its just me ).

Being A Developer After 40 – a good read for both new and old developers alike. It would be a pity if you weren’t to read this piece. The man share a lot of wisdom here from a long time working in the tech world, and I am sure this will be a worthwhile read even if you are not in this space.

Firing people – a really good article by Zach Holman on working and then getting fired from GitHub. I enjoyed it and hope you will too.

It’s official, the content marketers have invaded Medium. Yes, we’ve already seen a bunch of self help, listicle shit here, to the point that half the community complained about it. Only just now though, am I seeing posts like “how to gain followers on Medium”. The information contained in these posts is the generic stuff: a click bait headline, including inspirational quotes (here’s a hint, if you need quotes in your work to move people, you suck and need to get better), and offering life advice, or if we want to flog a dead horse even further “add value”.

I rarely read stuff from Bill Gates except for his book recommendations, but this one had an interesting title: Why I Would Raise Chickens. I am not all that :

If you were living on $2 a day, what would you do to improve your life?

That’s a real question for the nearly 1 billion people living in extreme poverty today. There’s no single right answer, of course, and poverty looks different in different places. But through my work with the foundation, I’ve met many people in poor countries who raise chickens, and I have learned a lot about the ins and outs of owning these birds. (As a city boy from Seattle, I had a lot to learn!) It’s pretty clear to me that just about anyone who’s living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens.

The future of podcasting – I started listening to podcasts a while back and it’s really interesting to me to see where this is going. I believe podcasting has a bright future. I hear more and more people every week that they found a good podcast they are listening to on the road, on their way to and from work etc. This reminds me, I have to write a post with a list of the podcasts I listen. Maybe you’ll find something interesting there.

“I think he’s helping us as a business,” Woodward said. “It’s a better website. I find things much more authoritative, quite frankly, than The New York Times.” Times partisans would surely disagree, but Woodward is nothing if not a loyal employee. He continued: “Bezos is good news for the newspaper, The Washington Post. I think he has a long-range view, staying in for 15 or 20 years and making sure The Washington Post is one of the surviving news sources in the country.”

Selfishness Is Learned – we are still figuring out a lot of stuff about how our own minds work, and this article is shedding a bit of light on the subject of selfishness.

“It feels good to be nice—unless the other person is a jerk,” he says. “And then it feels good to be mean.”

…

Many people cheat on taxes—no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught—now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make any logical sense. You might think that we should just be grateful for it. But if we could understand these seemingly irrational acts, perhaps we could encourage more of them.

I’m Not Living The Dream – this is the story of a nomad, you know, one of those guys that travels the world just because he can. Well, it seems, this is not every bit as great as people make it seem, but if you want to find out the rest, well, read the article 🙂

The Founding Father of Bling – have you ever wanted to find out who started the “bling” culture ? How about who made its start possible. Well, there was this jeweler, Jacob Arabo, who made something a lot of jewelers at that time refused, he made “the now iconic four-finger ring that spelled “Biz” in diamond-studded script”.

Now let’s tackle some more serious subjects:

Why Do the Poor Make Such Poor Decisions? – not really sure how to make a good excerpt for this article. It delves into a complicated subject and I just can’t summarize it in a couple of sentences. All i can tell you is that this is a good and interesting read.

Last time around I had a link to a some Medium updates. Today I am sharing this article on Everything You Already Know About Writing on Medium. The title is pretty self-explanatory so head over if you are a fan of Medium or you just want to find out more on getting started over there.

Ever since Pocket started recommending articles I got really into this feature. Most of the said recommendation are awesome and I just want to let you know that I will also have some of them on my lists as well. Now back to business:

The Matt Report Podcast ( interview with Chris Lema ) – I finally got to this one. I heard it was a good episode, and after I listened to it, I have to say, it indeed seemed to be above Matt’s usual episodes. Now if you never listened to this podcast, it is a WordPress podcast for business owners, freelancers and entrepreneurs where Matt interviews from the tech world on their business. This particular episode was a discussion with Chris Lema about pricing products, servicing customers, and persevering through the business world.

How Batching Your Tasks Will Put Your Productivity on Steroids – this is another podcast episode that I found was worth sharing and so here it is. In the words of Chris Ducker, the author, ” Batching is when you block off a section of time to do just one task and you schedule it on your calendar. You can do this with social media, copywriting, recording podcasts or video, and even with email. ” . If you happen to be a content producer, you will certainly find this to be useful.

Five New Tools for Your Publications – from the Medium staff. If you are using Medium then this might be interesting to you. I myself haven’t yet published anything here yet, but feature wise, they seem to be making good progress and keep bringing value to their users. I was on the skeptical side when Medium was announced but maybe there is something there after all. It seems to work. You get exposure, readers, a community, but for now I would still suggest you should not publish your stuff on Medium only. Keep a copy on your own site, just in case.

Practice Makes Possible: What We Learn By Studying Amazing Kids – this article is in part a book review. You should know that going in. Also you should know that the book seems to be pretty interesting. My “to-be-read” list is rather long, but I will be getting to reading this one as well at some point. Here is a piece of the article, I hope it will spark your interest:

Is talent a myth?

The idea that some people are born with gifts is a very counterproductive view — that your task as a high school student or college student is that you’re supposed to go around testing things to find your gift. Because I have yet to find anybody who finds their gift.

What Robert and I are arguing is that it’s much better to think of something you want to attain and then get the help of teachers and parents to start you on the path of creating that. On that path, you may decide you want to go in a different direction. That’s fine. But you haven’t simply been waiting around for something that would allow you to instantaneously become good because that’s never happening. And I think the process of really seeing how you can improve is something that will transfer even if you try to improve in some other domain.

This edition is a bit different, it’s more or less from the space of freelancing, growth hacking, copy-writing, personal and professional development and such.

Content on Content on Content – Gary Vaynerchuk is the man. One cannot help but admire his hustle and way of thinking and doing things. I found this one on medium, but it seems it is also available on his own blog. I like some of his content more than other but this is something I thought was worth sharing.

Friends, Money and Freedom Through Writing – James Altucher is another guy with a very hectic life and somehow he managed to make it big. I enjoy most of his articles and this one here does not disappoint either.

Walt Whitman’s advice for students – I really liked this little bit of content by Austin Kleon. I usually ignore motivational crap, like those quotes that in one way or another say ” follow your heart ” or ” do what you love “, mainly because, as I said before, it’s crap. But this Walt Whitman fellow seems to be all about ” don’t write poetry ” 🙂 and ” do the fucking work ” so I guess it’s worth sharing.

Living in the age of outrage – Mark Mason perfectly puts into words this age of outrage we are currently living in. This is a good example of how much more different it is when you read an opinion by someone who is a good writer 🙂 . Anyway, read it and share it, maybe you’ll give someone a wake up call.

The fabulist who changed journalism – this is a big feature on Janet Cooke, a reporter for The Washington Post who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, for a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict. It later turned out that the boy did not exist. This is an impressive story, but not for everyone, I think.

The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans – and this one is directly connected to the article above, meaning that I found it because Jessica mentioned it. The author says ” Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency. I’m one of them. ” This amount doesn’t really apply to me, because here ( in Romania ) $400 is quite a bit of money, but I get the gist of it, and if you replace the amount with one significant for your own country, you may find yourself ( as have I ) in the same shoes as well.

What does modern slavery look like? – ” More than 45 million people are living in modern slavery, with Asia accounting for two thirds of the victims, a new report says “, unsettling, isn’t it ? But somehow, I have to say, I am not surprised this is still a thing. The world is still a very weird place.

Robot Wars 2016: Everything you need to know – well, not exactly everything, but any info is good info in this case. I was such a fan of the original show and I believe they are right, this is a great time for a show like this, the tech is better, the materials cheaper, hell, this could end up to be a great thing 🙂 . Really looking forward to it.

My Adventures in Going Viral – apparently going viral on social media doesn’t equate to success. Some light reading from The New York Times.

Hamilton – America these days is obsessed with Hamilton ( the play ) and for this I have to say kudos to Lin-Manuel Miranda the author, creator and star of the play. He did a great job with this one. But even when I read this article I still can’t even begin to understand it. It may be a cultural thing or maybe it’s just me. Anyway, this was still a great read, greatly written.

WordPress Development for Beginners: Learning PHP by Daniel Pataki – this is a short introduction to PHP and as it can be noticed from the title, it is geared at people getting started with WordPress. Daniel goes on to explain the basics on variables, loops, functions and a few other things, so if you are a new web developer this article will be worth your time

I have been reading a lot of stuff from Medium.com lately, mainly because more and more people seem to be posting articles on this platform in parallel with their own separately hosted site. And when I say a lot, I mean enough that a separate post only for them was warranted. That doesn’t mean however that everything is a gem; on the contrary, there is a lot of fluff content on medium and the links I will be sharing won’t be too many and they’re stuff I feel would be interesting to you. Also, if you didn’t figure it out yet, by pocketed I meant saved with/in Pocket 🙂

So without any further ado, these are my latest saved articles from Medium:

Am I too old or too sick for Snapchat? by Loic Le Meur – this is a good question, I myself have tried to get on the Snapchat bandwagon but for some reason it hasn’t managed to reel me in. I keep hearing from quite a few people in the online ( and particularly online marketing ) space about its potential and keep telling myself I should pay more attention to it, but I just don’t at the moment

I have been busy lately. Busy at work and busy with learning and reading. And because I have been doing a lot of reading these past couple of months and because I keep everything in Pocket and Feedly, I now have a pretty interesting archive of articles on various areas of expertise. So, hopefully, in the following weeks I will be publishing quite a few collections of links, you know, to share the knowledge.